TL;DR: What would it take to allow users nominate posts for a contest?

I’m an admin on the Maslow CNC Discourse Forum (https://forums.maslowcnc.com). I have been running a weekly “Project of the Week” contest where users can nominate posted projects, a poll is generated, and the winner of the poll gets a forum badge as well as some router bits. It’s a great community builder, rewarding users who share their projects and giving community members ideas about how to use their machine. However, I have found that nominations are very spotty. Some weeks I get plenty of them, but other weeks we get none, even though there have been great projects posted. It seems that nominations just aren’t on user’s minds some weeks.

I believe that nominations will come more freely if there were a “Nominate” button in the menu at the bottom of posts, as suggested by a user. Ideally, this button would autopost a nomination on the weekly call for nominations topic, although that would require a setting somewhere to identify that topic. I’m open to other actions, though.

I have no experience with modifying Discourse, so right now I’m just trying to scope out how much effort a feature like this would require. I have seen Plugin tutorial #3 - How to add a button after every post?, so I know how that piece might work, but what action(s) would that button trigger?

Not all candidates for Project of the Week end up in their own topics. Sometimes a user will post a picture of a neat project as part of a related topic. I don’t really want to limit nominations to topics.

I still like the nomination process, whereas the voting plugin “nominates” all the topics in the selected Category (Categories?). I feel that User A nominating User B’s project helps add to the very positive vibe of the Maslow Community.

I will take a look at the voting plugin to see if there are elements I can use in my project, though, so thanks for the suggestion!